In recent years, digital cameras, printers, information processing terminals, and other various electronic devices have been made using reconfigurable circuits enabling internal circuit configurations to be electrically programmed so as to provide various functions.
Such reconfigurable circuits include, for example, dynamic reconfigurable circuits used as accelerators for CPUs and other external circuits which change their circuit configurations dynamically along with time based on the context from the CPUs.
In this regard, in the past, a reconfigurable circuit including a plurality of reconfigurable PEs (processing elements) and controlled by configuration data including connection information of the PEs and a semiconductor integrated circuit controlled by configuration data including connection information of PEs have been proposed.
While reconfigurable circuits have been proposed in the past as explained above, in conventional reconfigurable circuits, however, the transfer time for input/output data between input/output data interface units and external circuits may not be sufficiently shortened or the size of the circuits of the data network unit may not be sufficiently reduced.
Patent Document 1: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2009-003765
Patent Document 2: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. H05-006657
Patent Document 3: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. S62-151957
Patent Document 4: Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. S56-068979